Upward Bound

A Most Anticipated Book: The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Alta Journal, Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, Publishers Lunch

Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles’s disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister, Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center’s pool who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, Upward Bound’s director, who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center’s irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives—and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways—is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.

In Upward Bound, Woody Brown has created an indelible, authentic, and profoundly moving group portrait of autism and other disabilities, all illuminated by his empathy, sly sense of humor, and enormous gifts as a novelist. With remarkable sophistication, insight, and creativity, Brown depicts a community too-often invisible in literature and society. Filled with characters you won’t soon forget, Upward Bound will inspire and touch you, teaching you as much about yourself as the tender, miraculous world behind the center’s doors.

These discussion questions were provided by the publisher, Penguin Random House (Hogarth)

Book club questions for Upward Bound by Woody Brown

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

What assumptions did you hold about autistic people—especially those who are nonspeaking—before reading Upward Bound? How has the novel challenged, reshaped, or reinforced those assumptions?

Which character or characters did you feel most connected to, and why?

Many characters in the novel are constrained by systems meant to help them—schools, jobs, care facilities, social services. Where did the book make you feel the greatest tension between safety and freedom?

“You could tell that it didn’t even occur to them that we might mind being left waiting,” Walter observes. “As if time means nothing to people who have nothing but time.” He then counters this with, “I think it’s the opposite. Our time is wasted so profligately that we cherish time for what it might be, not for its emptiness.” How does the novel reframe whose time is considered valuable? Where else do you see time being controlled, wasted, or protected—and by whom?

Walter states, “People can be elitist when it comes to speech. If you can’t communicate, it must mean that you are mentally retarded.” How does the book challenge this assumption through structure, point of view, and interiority? Which characters are most harmed by this belief, and which benefit from it?

After reading this novel, what do you think a “good” institution for autistic young adults would look like? How could caregivers ensure that their clients—of varying, multifaceted sets of needs—get individualized care? What sweeping changes (politically, societally, economically, or otherwise) would need to happen before this institution could become a reality?

Throughout the book, dignity is shown not as something abstract but as something fragile and situational. Which characters feel most at risk of losing their dignity, and what actions—small or large—help preserve it?

“Here, without a real communication partner, I am as mute as Jorge,” Walter says. What does this reveal about communication as something relational rather than individual? Where else in the novel do systems, rather than bodies, create silence?

We’re told of Tom, “The same CP that makes his muscles and joints stiff as concrete also freeze his face and mouth. He can’t speak a word and can’t express emotions. He has them, god knows he has them, but he holds even the most benign feelings inside like a well-guarded secret.” How does Brown give Tom emotional agency despite—or because of—these constraints? How did reading Tom’s interior life shape your understanding of expression?

After the book ends, what do you think survival looks like for these characters? Is survival framed as progress, acceptance, resistance, storytelling, or something else entirely?

Upward Bound Book Club Questions PDF

Click here for a printable PDF of the Upward Bound discussion questions